Page 151 of The Incendiary

My stomach lurched. Something splintered behind my sternum. Something small, warm, and delicate that had started to grow for Elias Winterton. Not love, but friendship. With that one question, it cracked and turned to dust.

I stared at him. At his perfect, symmetrical face. Cheekbones that could cut glass. Flawless, deep blue-gray eyes. Still objectively the most beautiful man I had ever seen, without a doubt.

But suddenly, he looked and felt different. Unsafe.

“Shit,” sighed Eli, rubbing his hands over his eyes. “You have to be smarter than that.”

“I can’t take a shower?” My voice broke.

“Fera.” He sighed and pinched his nose. “You must know better. You must. You’re small, and you’re beautiful.” It sounded like a confession he didn’t want to make. “You have to protect yourself.”

I stared at my hands, bruised and still a little shaky. Sure, I could have been more careful. There were situations and places I could avoid going to alone to prevent what had happened. Perhaps I had failed to protect myself.

Or perhaps they had it out for me and would have found me anywhere.

“Did they… Did they fuck you?”

I inhaled raggedly and looked up at Elias. Had I heard that correctly?

“What?” I breathed. “Why are you asking me that?”

Elias shifted uncomfortably. His once-beautiful gaze swept over me like I was dirty. “Did they fuck you, Fera?”

That’s what he wanted to know? If I’d been tainted? Not what I was about to say about four men in his forces he’d recently been doubting? He wouldn’t ask what I needed from him, or what I wanted him to do, or what they’d said or why I was bruised and bleeding or crying or anything other than if they’d stuck their filthy cocks in me?

I refused to discuss details. I only wanted to make sure he knew the truth about Gerard and the others. That had been my priority. But now?

His question taunted me.

Did they fuck you?

He couldn’t even say rape.

“What if they did?” I sputtered out, eyes wide in disbelief.

I was asking for myself, but also for every vulnerable person under Eli’s protection. Every other person that wasn’t his queen. Every other person it could have happened to.

Every other person that needed their leader when they didn’t feel safe.

He didn’t know who I really was. Maybe that made this unfair. Or maybe not knowing my identity was the only way it was fair. I just knew that his answer would either strengthen or permanently maim whatever small part of my heart he had won over. This time, if broken, my heart would not regenerate. Not for him.

“What kind of question is that?” he snapped, brow furrowed in disbelief. “What I’d do to them doesn’t change what happened, so I’m asking you to tell me the truth.”

Abram cursed under his breath and turned away.

Elias was right. His answer wouldn’t change what happened. But it would change whether he was allowed to hear another gods-damned detail of what had happened. Gerard and the others would be long gone by now. Elias couldn’t do anything, but I was overwhelmed with the need to understand his intentions. What he would do, if he could. I had learned a lot in recent months, one thing being intentions mattered.

“Answer my question,” I uttered slowly, “and maybe I’ll answer yours. What. Would. You. Do?”

He studied the welts below my eyes, the cuts on my face, the bruises spreading like wildfire over my bare arms as if he was deciding for himself how badly I’d been abused and violated. As if the severity of my pain was up to him.

As if Molochai’s spies hadn’t been living unnoticed beneath him this entire time.

“I’d… send them on an assignment to posts in the brutal cold of Warrich.”

I nodded slowly, steeling myself against the sickness rising in my throat.

The brutal cold of Warrich.